“At least they didn’t read the first seventeen verses” might be the relief in the mind of someone at a Christmas carol service when one of the readings begins at Matthew 1:18, “This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about.” Surely that’s all we need to know! What is this long list of names and “begettings” (in older Bibles) doing on the first page of the New Testament? Well, a lot more than we might think.

The list matters. In ancient Israel, lists of ancestors (genealogies) mattered greatly. Just as in many traditional societies in the Majority World today, your identity includes your family. Who you are depends on who you belong to – not just your living relatives, but your family line going back many generations whose names you will remember from childhood. Genealogies in Israel (there are many in the Old Testament) proved your rightful place among God’s people and your share in God’s land. And for Jesus, the claim that He was Israel’s Messiah required proof that He was genuinely descended from King David and a legitimate son of Abraham. Have we got the right man, the true Messiah? Yes, says Matthew, and here’s the proof in the standard and accepted legal terms. The claim is valid.

The story matters. You’ve picked up Matthew’s Gospel because you want to know something about this Jesus the Christians keep talking about. “You won’t understand Jesus,” Matthew begins, “unless you see Him as the climax of this story, the story of God and Israel. This is the story, pinpointed through the names of all these historical people, that makes sense of who Jesus is and why He came.” This – the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Messiah Jesus – is the central act of the great drama of scripture, but we need all that went before to understand it. That’s why Matthew traces the story back through Abraham (to whom God promised to bless all nations on earth), and David (to whom God promised an eternal kingdom through his messianic heir), while Luke traces it right back to the first Adam (created in God’s image to rule and care for the earth and its creatures and proto-ancestor of the true Son of God, the heir of all creation).

The women matter. Matthew includes five women in his genealogy of Jesus – a most unusual thing to do in such lists: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary. All of them suffered in various ways: abandonment, prostitution, widowhood, adulterous abuse, teenage pregnancy. But all of them participated in the way God was working out his purposes in history, purposes that led to the salvation of the world by the One who was “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3), who earned the insult “friend of sinners.” And four of them were foreigners, not Israelites. The Messiah of Israel had Gentile genes in His ancestry and climaxed His earthly ministry (as Matthew also pointedly records) by sending His followers to make disciples of “all nations.”

That is the mission of God that is still ongoing, to the ends of the earth and to the end of the age. But it is the mission of God that was promised and programmed in the story that is traced in the genealogy of Jesus – the great story of the Bible in which we still participate in our own generation until He returns to claim His inheritance in the new creation and dwell with us, our Immanuel, forever.

Oh yes, this story with all its characters really matters! So enjoy getting to know some of them this Advent as Langham-connected friends from around the world introduce them to us.

Chris Wright
International Ambassador, Langham Partnership